The Better Half Read online

  It was hard to tell from here but Maeve’s eyes seemed to have widened. Dermot was leaning in and saying something into her ear in a way that suggested he was flirting with her. I had once heard him pontificating at a party that monogamy was just a blip, that we would all look back on it and see it as crazy. Maeve would be well able for him. Bold, brazen, sexy dark-haired Maeve, who had her hip cocked out now. Maeve had pizzazz.

  I needed to dislodge myself from my perch, where I was marooned inside my floating brain. I moved down the stairs slowly into the main part of the house, which was ablaze with lights. I paused on the bottom step, a little disoriented. Frank was in full flight, parrying questions about his planning permission. ‘I’ll get my planning,’ he was saying. ‘No question.’

  The reality was different. The newspapers were querying whether he would win his appeal to build his Dubai-style resort off the coast of Wexford, including two seven-star luxury hotels – the design had been described as like something out of a Buck Rogers cartoon: an enormous conference centre, a golf course and three swimming-pools built on different levels. Wexford County Council had refused permission. When he’d heard, Frank had turned the air blue.

  ‘It’s not like I didn’t take effing tables at fundraisers, or do my time on the chicken-and-chips circuit, or buy enough fecking drinks in the tent at the Galway races.’ He had appealed to An Bord Pleanála. There had been an unprecedented number of submissions made to the planning board about his development: local residents and public representatives had banded together and objected to it. It had been described as a ‘gargantuan monstrosity’ by the barrister representing one group of objectors, which had provoked a tirade from Frank.

  ‘What the fuck does that smug, curly-haired, speccy-four-eyed, short-arsed gun for hire know about architecture? How many people does he employ?’ Frank had bellowed. ‘What sort of risks has he taken, except lining his own feckin’ pocket?’

  They were saying that Frank had bought his enormous site at too inflated a price, at the very top of a market that was now spiralling downwards, and that he was too heavily borrowed. They were saying that there was no market left for this sort of upscale development and that he’d missed the boat, timing-wise. Basically they were saying that even if he got his permission to build – and this was by no means certain – he was screwed.

  To look at Frank now, puffing on his Cuban cigar, you’d have thought he didn’t have a care in the world. But Frank was a good actor. I knew that now for sure. Old Frank with his secret life.

  When I was a young one, myself and my mates used to spend hours lying on our beds, smoking fags in our Frankie Says Relax T-shirts and Bananarama hair, discussing fellas and love and going the whole way and what we’d do if they did the dirt on us. With our fresh skin and big hopes, we were clear: we’d sling them out the door if they even so much as looked at another young one. ‘His fecking feet wouldn’t touch the ground – I’ll tell you that much for nothing.’

  Now I had no clear plan. My mind was a blank. There were no concrete thoughts, just a giant hole where Frank and his girl had taken a sledgehammer to my existence. If I could just get through the party … I thought, gliding towards the kitchen.

  The hired staff were buzzing about our giant kitchen like a swarm of bees, dwarfed by the giant proportions of the room. Frank had blasted off the back wall of the original kitchen and extended it. At this moment it seemed stupidly big. Like a football stadium. But Frank could never have enough room.

  Our house had been over six thousand square feet when we’d bought it – it had had three reception rooms, seven bedrooms and three bathrooms – and Frank had thought we needed to extend it. He was raging when we were refused permission to bulldoze the whole place and build a thirty-thousand-square-feet-plus ‘modern villa’. Frank had a lust for tearing old things down and replacing them with big bright shiny new ones. His idea for adding turrets to the house had also been vetoed. Frank wanted to live in a giant modern house tricked out like a castle. Ideally he would have liked to stick up an enormous coat of arms, like the ones that got sold to good-natured but dopey Americans.

  In the end he got away with lobbing a couple of thousand square feet onto the house – hence the enormous kitchen – and converted the coach house out the back as a pad for Dylan, renovating it at vast expense. I figured that, with Dylan, it might be a case of till death did us part. My guess was that he would never want to leave behind the surround sound and mood lighting, the weights rooms and the under-floor heating.

  Anyway, Frank saw space as something to be concreted over and colonized. He needed to own things, to possess them. He had sued several people over boundary disputes.

  His family were like something out of John B. Keane’s The Field. ‘You’ll never go hungry if you own a few acres,’ was their basic motto. There was probably a degree of horse sense in this, but it also meant they’d push you over a cliff for a few square feet of ground.

  I grew up in a tenement flat the size of a postage stamp. My ma kept it spotless. She had very high standards, but there were always other people’s bodies, smells and noises in it. The bedroom I shared with my sister smelt of cooking. Sometimes our clothes smelt of lard. The telly was always on in the corner of the sitting room, somebody fiddling with the rabbit-ears aerial to get a better reception. There was never silence and there was never space. I was happy to live in a big, beautiful house. Sometimes, though, recently, I’d caught myself wondering if there might be a limit to the amount of space four people needed. I’d said as much to Frank when his big plans to level the original house had been shot down.

  ‘You sound like a fuckin’ Communist, Anita,’ he’d said.

  Now the rain beat against the panes. The wind howled. Something blew past the window – a plastic bag being sucked up into the ether. I would happily have floated after it. My husband was having sexual relations with a girl – a plump girl. This fact should have been beside the point but it seemed very relevant to me. After all my years of sweating on the treadmill, killing myself to keep my thighs slim, he’d gone after a chubby girl. The revelation that Frank lusted after thighs and a soft belly and curves when I had tortured myself to look like an exclamation mark seemed a very big deal to me.

  The head waiter approached me, looking worried. ‘Is everything all right, Mrs Lawlor?’

  For one split second I considered telling the truth: ‘Things couldn’t be worse. My husband, the one you hear laughing and joking without a care in the world, is boning a girl not much older than our son and she’s possibly in the family way.’ I closed my eyes briefly. When I opened them the waiter was staring at me.

  ‘Are you okay, Mrs Lawlor? Would you like to sit down? Maybe I could get you a glass of water.’

  I needed to speak: several pairs of eyes were trained on me – their mad hostess, let down from the attic for the night. ‘I’m grand, thank you,’ I said, in my best posh voice, into which I’d put a lot of work. ‘The food looks delicious. Thank you all very much.’ I dredged up a smile before backing away, glassy-eyed.

  My movements were mechanical. I went back into the party and wandered about, pausing here and there to say hello and God knew what else. I could see Ciara and Will in the distance. Ciara’s long, elegant black dress made her look even more willowy than usual; her pale smooth hair was twirled up in a bun and her red lips made her skin seem like porcelain. She had innate style. Always knew when to stop, that less was more. It was a skill I wished she could pass on. I had tried so hard to copy it but it was dawning on me that I would never nail it.

  Will had an arm around her. He looked gorgeous in his tuxedo, as if he might have been born in one. Frank, by contrast, seemed awkward in his. Somehow he always managed to make it look rented. Will and Ciara resembled movie stars, but I knew without looking into Ciara’s eyes that all was not as it seemed on the surface.

  You see, I’d learned that you never knew what went on behind closed doo
rs. Not even behind your own closed door, it turned out, I thought, seeing a group of women I knew. Some were friends, others acquaintances. They stood by a cluster of large potted plants that had been brought in for the party, exotic birds of paradise in their party frocks. A tight knot, their heads bent like daffodils as Maeve told an anecdote – whip-smart, sometimes funny, always razor-tongued Maeve.

  She was always telling tales about her husband and the way he pissed her off. Ultan was chairman and principal of Mohally Murphy Equity. MM had been one of the huge successes of the boom, snapping up property, development land, hotels, companies all over Europe and beyond for consortia of well-heeled Irish investors. Ultan Mohally was a tall, thin, ascetic workaholic with a serious manner and the eyes of a shark. He was a virtual social recluse, without friends or hobbies, and was now reputed to be a multi-millionaire. He hit the news at regular intervals for the increasingly audacious deals he was putting together. Frank and many of our cronies had invested in a number of the syndicates he had masterminded.

  Typically, Ultan had not come to the party, instead sending a case of ridiculously expensive wine as a present. Maeve, an accountant, had met him while she was on secondment to his firm. They had married three months after a whirlwind courtship. Eight months later she had produced a long, thin baby called Maximilian Sebastian Ultan Mohally, who looked like a miniature version of his father. A baby girl, Madison Portia, had followed two years later; she had turned into a small girl with glossy black curls and a ceaseless whine.

  Maeve and Ultan lived in a twenty-thousand-square-feet Georgian home, which she redecorated on a yearly basis with the help of a retinue of staff. ‘I’m like the girls in the Janis Ian song,’ Maeve had said at her birthday party after a good few jars. ‘You know – the clear-skinned girls who married young and then retired.’

  Maeve had been having sex lately with Max’s tennis coach, a Frenchman who slunk around the gym with his sallow limbs and dark come-hither eyes and silky hair, igniting flames in the chests of the mothers who brought their kids for tennis lessons and sometimes paid him to go to bed with them. There was a lot of maternal servicing disguised as dental treatment among the women at our gym.

  But who was I to judge? My husband was swinging it about. Ultan lived to work. It was impossible to imagine being intimate with him. Maeve had once told me she had never come with Ultan. At least, I’m pretty sure that was what she’d said. We’d been pretty jarred at the time. We were booze buddies. My poison was a Cosmo, hers a Margarita without salt. There were bars and restaurants we could walk into and they’d start throwing together our drinks before we’d even ordered.

  Maeve bitched about Ultan. Lots of women bitched about their husbands, even when they loved them. They let off steam about their fellas, gave out yards about them, but in a semi-indulgent way that let you know you couldn’t join in and say, ‘Yeah, I always figured Michael was tight as a duck’s arse.’ I did it myself. It was therapy for married women – or ‘the girls’, as our husbands called us.

  But you wouldn’t introduce any really bad stuff to that circle. You wouldn’t confess that your husband beat you or that he gave you no money or that he came home so drunk he peed in the marital bed. You might drop hints that he was no Casanova or that he could do with being a little more generous or that he was fond of a drink, but there were understood limits. You wouldn’t say that you thought he was shagging a twenty-something and possibly fathering her child. You wouldn’t say that, although you were upright and seemingly functioning (apart from the drugs and booze coursing through your system), you felt dead.

  Dead woman walking: that was me, I thought, as Maeve beckoned to me. Another woman was making a little fluttering gesture with her hand. I was trapped in the headlamp glare of their curiosity. There was no choice but to go over.

  ‘Hi there, we were wondering where you’d got to,’ Shannon said.

  She was our American friend. A former corporate lawyer, she was smart. But as the youngest colleen of a large, solidly Catholic Irish-American family, she had grown up on lore of the Emerald Isle, where people were pious, good, simple folk from an agrarian land where values were wholesome and the maidens pure. Simply put, she was gobsmacked when she married an Irishman and was parachuted into the middle of us reprobates.

  She leant forward and hugged me, pressing me so hard against her tanned breastbone that her dress rustled a little. I had to steel myself against the warmth of her greeting so that I didn’t start to cry. ‘Hello,’ I chimed, inhaling her flowery scent.

  Shannon went to the same gym as Maeve, Ciara and I. We met for coffee two or three times a week in some configuration, usually in Harvey Nichols in Dundrum, where we’d sit in the glass-cube café pushing our scones around our plates and sipping skinny decaf lattes. Shannon was mad for the exercise. She went at it like a lunatic on the cross-trainer, pounding away as if the survival of the human race depended on it. If tall, sinewy, rake-thin Shannon missed a day in the gym, you knew there had been a death in the family. In her immediate family, that was. We all exercised a lot but Shannon was like the Duracell bunny. She could have outrun Forrest Gump. ‘Guys,’ she’d say, ‘I have to exercise like this because otherwise I’m gonna turn into a blimp.’

  It was hard to believe. With every successive year Shannon seemed to shrink. She had once worked in a large firm where the bone-crushing hours had wrung her inside-out. She had spoken of meetings called by colleagues late at night, gruelling deadlines, and American clients working on American time, with their maniacal devotion to duty. ‘I mean, obviously I gave up my job as an attorney when I moved to Ireland but I don’t think I could have kept that kind of pace up once I’d had the kids. I was pretty much maxed out.’

  She had told us of the kind of difficulties that women encountered in her firm. ‘I worked for this one woman. She was a really cool kick-ass chick, smart and hard-working, but her life was, like, total hell. She had a couple of kids, a daytime nanny and one for the night. Sometimes she even hired extra help at the weekends. You could totally see that the whole thing was eating away at her. Then one day she found this note lurking at the bottom of her son’s school sack like a ticking bomb waiting to detonate. There was a costume party the next day. She was working on a takeover. She ended up hysterically begging the poor little guy to be something kind of inappropriate like a sheikh because she only had a dish-towel to put on his head.’ Shannon laughed. ‘That was like her wake-up call. She left, which was kind of sad but it took guts to walk away like that.’

  Shannon was married to a stockbroker, a tubby man who looked a bit like a docker and zoomed around the city in a camel coat and an array of flash cars. Jimmy had an easy smile and an appetite for the finer things in life. A partner in one of the leading stockbroking firms around town, he had bought a private plane and a large yacht, although he couldn’t sail, and he also kept horses. ‘I love the gee-gees,’ he’d say, in his broad Cavan accent.

  Shannon was project-managing the construction of their new home in Sandymount, a state-of-the-art modern house. ‘I need something to do,’ she’d said. ‘I get so restless.’

  I had persuaded her to talk to Ella about her experience of a legal career. Ella had said it was way too soon, that I was jumping the gun. ‘You need to take a chill pill, Mum.’

  I didn’t care. Young girls needed mentors to guide them and point out the pitfalls. I didn’t want anything getting in Ella’s way. Shannon had given her some very solid advice. She was obliging like that.

  A flurry of attention was directed at me.

  ‘Your dress is so cute,’ said Shannon. Sometimes Maeve grumbled that Shannon was too effusive. ‘Jesus, she’d get excited if two flies crawled up the wall.’ But the thing about Shannon was that she meant it. She didn’t have a bad bone in her body.

  A chorus of compliments on my dress followed. I gazed at my friends. They must be joking. I looked underdressed, in that my outfit was the size of a stickin
g plaster, and beyond mutton dressed as lamb. I was ridiculous in scarlet and feathers, my feet, like little pigs’ trotters, shoved into towering sparkly shoes that were slightly too small.

  ‘Everything going well?’ Maeve asked. She laid a bejewelled hand on my arm, her pendant diamond earrings swaying hypnotically. She was treacherous, that one, with an appetite for other people’s weaknesses. In a flash you could have told her too much and there would be no taking it back. She could siphon information from you when you had no idea you were being prised open like a clam. Her conversation seemed random but was a series of probes that went far beyond what you might have called intrusive. Maeve and I were friends but you couldn’t tell her everything. She’d trade it in a flash for other gossip.

  I trawled inside my sedated brain for the right words, nailed a hostessy smile to my features and smiled brilliantly at her. I parted my lying lips to speak. ‘Everything is great,’ I said.

  I knew then what my response to my discovery would be. My resolution had crystallized. I was dimly aware of a ball of rage deep inside me that I had pushed down. I would fight tooth and nail for my marriage and my place in life. I would paper over the cracks. From where I was standing I had no choice.

  The largest of the three reception rooms twinkled with candles. We were using it as a ballroom. Frank and I – watched by the assembled crowd – twirled around the floor to the strains of the band the bank were paying for. Frank was drunk on the attention. Performing. The larger-than-life property developer, the man they said had ‘the balls of an elephant’. We were a sham on more than one level, I thought, as he turned me round and round.